Ralph Stanley

Ralph Stanley is the longest-lived of the pioneering musicians who established the form of latter-day string band music known as “bluegrass” in the late 1940s. Stanley himself prefers the term “old-time mountain music”; a Virginian, he may take issue with the genre’s handle, established by the name of Kentuckian Bill Monroe’s founding unit, The Blue Grass Boys. With Monroe’s death in 1996 and banjo player Earl Scruggs’ concurrent move into semi-retirement, Stanley became the most prominent bluegrass originator still on the scene.